The Beverly Hills police department must dread having to haul local teenage millionaires off to jail for a grisly crime: the tabloids swarm, the rumors fly, the suspects hire the best defense lawyers money can buy -- and all those involved (even the minor players) act as if they are characters in the first draft of a convoluted screenplay desperately in need of a rewrite. Thus it has been several miserable months for the prosecutors in charge of the Menendez murder investigation; they are fielding two young millionaires, charges of patricide, disputed psychotherapy records and flamboyant defense attorneys claiming that vital evidence is inadmissible. And now the key witnesses are behaving like fruitcakes before the trial even begins.
The savagery of the crime and the stature of the victims guaranteed headlines from the start. Jose Menendez, a successful video mogul who ran Live Entertainment Inc., and his wife Kitty were found dead in the TV room of their Beverly Hills mansion last year, their faces blown off and bodies mangled by 14 blasts from two 12-gauge shotguns. But the story didn't make the cover of PEOPLE until seven months later, when the suspects were finally arrested. They turned out to be not a couple of Mob gunmen, as first thought, but the Menendezes' swaggering sons: Lyle, 22, who left Princeton after being caught cheating; and Erik, 19, a writer of poems and screenplays who tried unsuccessfully to make it as a pro tennis player.
The boys sit in a county jail not far from skid row, tans fading, while their lawyers battle over whether prosecutors can introduce tapes or notes of confidential conversations between the Menendez boys and their psychotherapist. A lower court ruled the tapes were admissible, but the California Supreme Court stayed the decision and is expected to issue its ruling next month. So far, crime fans and predatory screenwriters waiting to learn how the story ends have had to content themselves with a steamy drama playing outside the courtroom, as the details emerge about how police knew to look for those tapes in the first place.
It turns out that investigators never really believed the Mob rubout story, on one hand: the murder was too messy, and hit men rarely kill the wife of their target. On the other hand, if the brothers' greed was the motive, they would have had to kill both parents to inherit their $14 million estate. Other pieces soon fell into place: investigators found a screenplay that Erik wrote about a young man who murders his very rich parents for their money. A home- computer disk thought to contain the father's revised will was mysteriously erased. Far from appearing crushed with grief, after the slayings the boys set off on a $700,000 shopping spree.
But none of this was conclusive -- not even the shotgun shell casing found in Lyle's jacket -- until a mysterious witness emerged. An informant told police that psychotherapist Jerome Oziel had tapes and notes of his sessions with the Menendez boys in which they confessed to the crime. The informant added that she overheard the confessions from the doctor's waiting room. Police seized the tapes and arrested Lyle; three days later, Erik turned himself in.